FUDCon India 2008

Fedora Users and Developer's conference is tentatively scheduled in Bangalore, at the end of November 2008 as part of foss.in conference. The first FUDCon in India was at Delhi in 2006. The tentative plan is to follow the barcamp style if the infrastructure is available.

The Introduction

The Fedora Project desires to be part of FOSS.IN by organizing a Fedora Users and Developers Conference (hereinafter abbreviated to the more commonly recognized form: FUDCon). The FUDCon would be open for all those attending (and/or participating
at FOSS.IN). Free pre-registration would be undertaken on the project wiki (Fedora Project Wiki) to estimate the probable attendance and perhaps arrange for pre-printed name tags.

The Objective

By its very name FUDCon is aimed at users and developers within the Fedora Project. However, it is also aimed at raising the level of
awareness of how to contribute to Fedora and in particular increase the number of contributors from India.

The Proposed Format

The FUDCon is proposed to have a collaborative format of a lesser number of talks and a larger share of sessions aimed at doing things in real life. This approach mandates that there is a strictly defined agenda and somewhat of a narrow focus to allow effective contributions and efficient usage of the presence at foss.in

This format is also seen to fit in with the foss.in philosophy of 'talk is cheap, show me the code' and thus the proposed FUDCon would be a good fit within the structure of the main event.

What gets done at FUDCon

From an overview a lot gets done if two conditions are met: [i] there are facilities for discussion and [ii] there are pre-defined areas of attack. While not completely finalized, there are a few topics that have received positive response on the fedora-india mailing list. These include:

Packaging Java Applications with the aim to show ISVs how to package applications for Fedora

Debugging using Systemtap leading to contribution of tapscripts to the War Stories section of the Systemtap wiki

Merge Review sprint for Packaging

Collaborative Bug Triage Sessions for generating new contributions

Spins and LiveMedia sessions

Internationalization and Localization Sprint

KDE and Fedora sprint aimed at testing the KDE desktop and package small KDE apps in Fedora

Hands on mirror set up [General and Instant mirror] [susmit]

In addition to this, there would be stations which would allow participants to get LiveMedia installed on USB and Join Fedora stations which would allow potential contributors to use the click-through CLA process to sign up.

A meeting with the GSoC students doing SoC Projects under Fedora is also proposed to be arranged.

Infrastructure

A room for talks - capacity 60-80 people.

Space to arrange round-tables and chairs - at least 8 such sets so as to have parallel discussion sessions running

Whiteboards, whiteboard markers and board eraser for each table

An adequate number of flipcharts for each table

A central table with a projector and display-screen to allow any

discussion group to move into impromptu presentation mode

Wireless / Wired Network Access

Adequate supply of power for laptops / desktops

Sound amplification units

Pre-event work

Build up to the FUDCon, including holding IRC classrooms and such which will help get in place an attentive audience would begin from the month of July and continue till FOSS.IN.

James Morris would like to talk about and demonstrate sVirt, a project to add MAC security (i.e. SELinux) support to linux-based virtualization (i.e. KVM). This is currently a WIP, and perhaps we can do some hacking on it together. Lots of XML, Python, libvirt, storage labeling etc. work to be done.